James Mill

James Mill (1773–1836) was a Scots-born political philosopher,
historian, psychologist, educational theorist, economist, and legal,
political and penal reformer. Well-known and highly regarded in his
day, he is now all but forgotten. Mill's reputation now rests
mainly on two biographical facts. The first is that his first-born son
was John Stuart Mill, who became even more eminent than his father. The
second is that the elder Mill was the collaborator and ally of Jeremy
Bentham, whose subsequent reputation also eclipsed the elder Mill's. My
aim here is to try, insofar as possible, to remove Mill from these two
large shadows and to reconsider him as a formidable thinker in his own
right.

Mill's range of interests was remarkably wide, extending from
education and psychology in his two-volume Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829b), to political economy (he
persuaded his friend David Ricardo to write on that subject, as Mill
himself did in his Elements of Political Economy, 1821), to
penology and prison reform, to the law and history, and, not least, to
political philosophy. On these and other subjects he wrote five
books and more than a thousand essays and reviews. It is with Mill the
political philosopher that the present article is principally
concerned.

Unlike his famous first-born son, James Mill never wrote an
autobiography or even a sketch of his early life, the details of which
remained unknown even to his children. What we do know is this. James
Mill was born on 6 April 1773 at Northwater Bridge in the county of
Forfarshire in the parish of Logie Pert in Scotland. His father,
James Milne, was a shoemaker and small farmer of modest means who was
quiet, mild-mannered, and devout. His mother, Isabel Fenton Milne, was
a more forceful figure. Determined that her first-born son should get
ahead in the world, she changed the family name from the Scottish
“Milne” to the more English-sounding “Mill,”
and kept young James away from other children, demanding that he spend
most of his waking hours immersed in study. His “sole
occupation,” as his biographer Alexander Bain remarks,
“was study” (Bain 1882, 7). (A regimen rather like that
imposed by his mother upon her eldest son was later to be imposed upon
his first-born son, John Stuart Mill.) In this occupation young James
clearly excelled. Before the age of seven he had shown a talent for
elocution, composition, and arithmetic, as well as Latin and
Greek. The local minister saw to it that James received special
attention at the parish school. At age ten or eleven, he was sent to
Montrose Academy, where his teachers “were always overflowing
with the praises of Mill's cleverness and perseverance” (Bain
1882, 8). Before leaving Montrose Academy at the age of seventeen,
Mill was persuaded by the parish minister and his mother to study for
the ministry. Mill's decision evidently pleased Lady Jane Stuart, wife
of Sir John Stuart of Fettercairn, who headed a local charity founded
for the purpose of educating poor but bright boys for the Presbyterian
ministry. Mill, eminently qualified in both respects, became the
recipient of Lady Jane's largesse. As it happened, she and Sir John
were just then looking for a tutor for their fourteen-year old
daughter Wilhelmina. They offered the job to James Mill; he accepted;
and when the Stuart family moved to Edinburgh, he accompanied
them.

In 1790, Mill enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, where by day he
pursued a full course of studies and in the evenings tutored young
Wilhelmina. Each experience left its mark. The Scottish universities
at Edinburgh and Glasgow (and to a lesser extent Aberdeen and
St. Andrews) had earlier been the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment
and were still the premier universities in Britain. They had numbered
among their faculty such luminaries as Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid,
John Millar, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and—had the orthodox
town council of Edinburgh not forbade his admission—would have
included David Hume as well. At Edinburgh Mill took particular delight
in the tutelage of Dugald Stewart, who carried on the tradition of
Scottish moral philosophy. In addition to moral philosophy, Mill's
course of studies included history, political economy, and the
classics, including Mill's favorite philosopher, Plato. Mill's mind
never lost the stamp of his Scottish education. As his eldest son was
later to remark, James Mill was “the last survivor of this great
school” (J.S. Mill 1843, 566).

From 1790 to 1794 Mill served young Wilhelmina Stuart not only as a
teacher but as a companion and confidant. Her admiration for her tutor
quite likely turned to love, and the feeling was apparently
reciprocated. But, however promising his prospects, Mill was no
aristocrat, a social fact which he was not allowed to forget. In 1797
Wilhelmina married a member of her own class and died in childbirth
shortly thereafter. She was said to have called out Mill's name “with
her last breath.” Mill never forgot her; he spoke of her always with
wistful affection and named his first-born daughter after her.

After completing his first degree in 1794, Mill began studying for the
ministry. For the next four years he supported himself by tutoring the
sons and daughters of several noble families. The experience was not a
happy one. For repeatedly forgetting his “place” in
“polite society” he suffered one insult after another. He
harbored ever after an abiding hatred for an hereditary
aristocracy.

By the time he was licensed to preach in 1798 Mill had apparently
begun to lose his faith and had by the early 1800s become restless and
disillusioned. In 1802, at age twenty-nine, he left for London in
hopes of improving his situation. For some years thereafter he worked
as an independent author, journalist and editor. From 1802 until his
appointment as an assistant examiner of correspondence at the East
India Company in 1819 Mill's literary labors were prodigious. Besides
some 1,400 editorials, he wrote hundreds of substantial articles and
reviews, as well as several books, including his History of
British India in three large volumes. Although some of these were
doubtless labors of love, most were labors of necessity, for Mill had
to support himself and his wife Harriet, whom he married in 1805, and
a fast-growing family. The first of his nine children, born in 1806,
was named John Stuart in honor of his father's Scottish patron.

In late 1807 or early 1808 James Mill met Jeremy Bentham, with whom he
soon formed a political and philosophical alliance. The two were in
some respects kindred spirits. Both wished and worked for religious
toleration and legal reform; both favored freedom of speech and press;
both feared that the failure to reform the British political
system—by, among other things, eliminating rotten boroughs and
extending the franchise—would give rise to reactionary
intransigence on the one hand, and revolutionary excess on the
other. But the two men were of vastly different temperaments and
backgrounds. Bentham, a wealthy bachelor, was an eccentric genius and
closet philosopher. The poor, harried and hard-working Mill was the
more practical and worldly partner in that peculiar partnership. He
was also a much clearer writer and more persuasive propagandist for
the Utilitarian cause.

Bentham believed that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of
pain were the twin aims of all human action. His philosophy,
Utilitarianism, held that self-interest—understood as pleasure
or happiness—should be “maximized” and pain
“minimized” (Bentham, incidentally, coined both
terms). And, as with individual self-interest, so too with the public
interest. According to Bentham, the aim of legislation and public
policy was to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number.” Mill agreed, after a fashion. Formerly a dour Scots
Presbyterian and still something of a Platonist, he took a dim view of
unalloyed hedonism. Like Plato, he ranked the pleasures in a
hierarchy, with the sensual pleasures subordinated to the intellectual
ones.

Despite their differences, Mill proved to be Bentham's most valuable
ally. A better writer and abler advocate, Mill helped to make
Bentham's ideas and schemes more palatable and popular than they might
otherwise have been. But he also influenced Bentham's ideas in a
number of ways. For one, Mill led Bentham to appreciate the
importance of economic factors in explaining and changing social life
and political institutions; for another, he turned Bentham away from
advocating aristocratic “top-down” reform into a more
popular or “democratic” direction. For a time their
partnership proved fruitful. With Mill's energy and Bentham's ideas
and financial backing, Utilitarian schemes for legal, political,
penal, and educational reform gained an ever wider audience and circle
of adherents. This circle included, among others, Francis Place
(“the radical tailor of Charing Cross”), the Genevan
Etienne Dumont, the historian George Grote, the
stockbroker-turned-economist David Ricardo, and—certainly not
least—the young John Stuart Mill. Each in his own way enlisted
in the Utilitarian cause. The cause was furthered by the founding of
the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and, later, by the
launching of the Westminster Review and the founding of
University College London (where Bentham's body, stuffed and mounted
in a glass case, can still be seen today). This small band of
“philosophic radicals” worked tirelessly for political
changes, several of which were later incorporated into the Reform Act
of 1832. But Bentham and Mill became increasingly estranged. Bentham
was irascible and difficult to work with, and Mill on more than one
occasion swallowed his pride by accepting financial support and
suffering personal rebuke from his senior partner.

In 1818, after twelve years' work, Mill's massive History of
British India was published. Early in the following year he was
appointed Assistant Examiner at the East India Company. His financial
future finally secured, Mill no longer needed Bentham's largesse. The
two men saw less and less of each other. Their political alliance
continued even as their personal relationship cooled. Their uneasy
friendship effectively ended some years before Bentham's death in
1832.

Besides being a tireless reformer and prolific writer, James Mill
supplied his son John with one of the most strenuous educations ever
recorded in the annals of pedagogy. The elder Mill gave young John
daily lessons in Latin, Greek, French, history, philosophy, and
political economy. Literature and poetry were also taught, although
with less enthusiasm (James Mill, like Plato, distrusted poets and
poetry). John was in turn expected to tutor his younger brothers and
sisters in these subjects. Each was examined rigorously and regularly
by their unforgiving father, and the nine children, like their mother,
lived with in fear of his rebuke. As John Stuart Mill later wrote, “I
… grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear”
(J.S. Mill 1969, 33).

Mill's strained relations with his wife and children stand in stark
contrast with his warm and cordial relations with others, and most
especially the young men who sought him out for the pleasure of his
company and the vigor of his conversation. As John Black, the editor
of the Morning Chronicle, recalled on the occasion of Mill's
death in 1836:

Mr. Mill was eloquent and impressive in conversation. He had a great
command of language, which bore the stamp of his earnest and energetic
character. Young men were particularly fond of his society … No man
could enjoy his society without catching a portion of his elevated
enthusiasm … His conversation was so energetic and complete in
thought, so succinct, and exact … in expression, that, if
reported as uttered, his colloquial observations or arguments would
have been perfect compositions (quoted in Bain 1882, 457).

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Mill's writings, which tend
to be both dry and didactic.

James Mill always attempted to write, he said, with “manly
plainness,” and in that endeavor he certainly succeeded. The
reader is never at a loss to know just what his views are or where his
sympathies lie. Mill's manly plainness is especially evident in his
massive 3-volume History of British India, which begins with
a remarkable preface in which he asserts that his objectivity is
guaranteed by the fact that he has never visited India. His is, he
says, a “critical, or judging history,” and his judgments
on Hindu customs and practices are particularly harsh (Mill 1818, I,
x). He denounces their “rude” and “backward”
culture for its cultivation of ignorance and its veneration of
superstition, and leaves no doubt that he favors a strong dose of
Utilitarian rationalism as an antidote. Although his History
is in part a Utilitarian treatise and in part a defense of British
intervention in Indian affairs, it is more than the sum of those two
parts. Mill's
History shows, perhaps more clearly than any of his other
works, the continuing influence of his Scottish education. The
criteria according to which Mill judges and criticizes Indian
practices and customs derive from the view of historical progress that
he had learned from Dugald Stewart and John Millar, amongst
others. According to this view “man is a progressive being” and
education is the chief engine of progress. And this in turn helps to
explain not only Mill's harsh judgments on the Hindus but his
continually reiterated emphasis on education (Mill 1992, 139–84).

Virtually everything that James Mill ever wrote had a pedagogical
purpose. He was a relentlessly didactic writer whose most important
essays—Government, in particular—take the form of
clipped, concise, deductive arguments. It is a style which his
contemporaries either admired or detested, as can be seen for instance
in F. D. Maurice's novel Eustace Conway. When the Benthamite
Morton discovers Eustace reading Mill's Essay on Government,
he asks his opinion of Mill. Eustace replies:

“I think him nearly the most wonderful prose-writer in our language.”

“That do not I,” says Morton. “I approve the matter
of his treatises exceedingly, but the style seems to me
detestable.”

“Oh!,” says Eustace, “I cannot separate matter and
style … My reason for delighting in this book is, that it gives such
a fixedness and reality to all that was most vaguely brilliant in my
speculations—it converts dreams into demonstrations”
(quoted in Thomas 1969, 255–56).

Many of Mill's readers were not so gentle. Thomas Babington Macaulay
criticized Mill and his fellow Utilitarians for “affect[ing] a
quakerly plainness, or rather a cynical negligence and impurity of
style.” In so doing,

they surrender their understandings … to the meanest and most
abject sophisms, provided those sophisms come before them disguised
with the externals of demonstration. They do not seem to know that
logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric,—that a fallacy
may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor (Macaulay 1992,
272–73).

But if Mill's style of reasoning and writing was plain and
unadorned, it was at least clear and cogent. And that, surely, is a
virtue too often lacking among political theorists.

And indeed James Mill regarded himself as a theorist, which was, for
him, a title to be worn proudly. Theory, he wrote, gives a “commanding
view” of its subject and serves as a guide for improving practice.
Theory precedes practice or “experience” and is not simply derived
from it. Amidst the often contradictory welter of appearance, theory
functions a priori, serving as a reliable weather vane and
guide (Mill 1992, 141). This view of theory is much in evidence in all
his writings, and in his political essays in particular. The most
important of these—and the most controversial—is
Government.

Whether justly or not, Mill's modern reputation as a political
theorist rests on a single essay. The Essay on Government,
Mill later wrote, was meant to serve as a “comprehensive
outline” or “skeleton map” with whose aid one could
find one's way across the vast, varied, and ofttimes confusing and
dangerous terrain of politics (Mill 1820). Government, Mill maintains,
is merely a means to an end, viz. the happiness of the whole community
and the individuals composing it. We should begin by assuming that
every human being is motivated by a desire to experience pleasure and
to avoid pain. Pleasures and pains come from two sources, our fellow
human beings and nature. Government is concerned directly with the
first and indirectly with the second: “Its business is to
increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the
pains, which men derive from one another.” Yet, “the
primary cause of government” is to be found in nature itself,
since humans must wrest from nature “the scanty materials of
happiness” (Mill 1992, 4–5). Nature and human nature combine to
make government necessary. It is man's nature not only to desire
happiness but to satisfy that desire by investing as little effort as
possible. Labor being the means of obtaining happiness, and our own
labor being painful to us, we will, if permitted, live off the labor
of others. To the degree that others enjoy the fruits of my labor, my
primary incentive for working—namely my own happiness—is
diminished if not destroyed.

Therefore, Mill continues, the primary problem in designing workable
political institutions is to maximize the happiness of the community
by minimizing the extent to which some of its members may encroach
upon, and enjoy, the fruits of other people's labor. This cannot
happen, Mill maintains, in a monarchy (wherein a single ruler exploits
his subjects) or in an aristocracy (wherein a ruling elite exploits
the common people). Nor can communal happiness be maximized in a
direct democracy, since the time and effort required for ruling would
be subtracted from that available for engaging in productive labor
(Mill 1992, 7–9). The only system that serves as a means to the end of
individual and communal happiness is representative democracy, wherein
citizens elect representatives to deliberate and legislate on their
behalf and in their interest. The problem immediately arises, however,
as to how representatives can be made to rule on the people's behalf
rather than their own. Mill's answer is that frequent elections and
short terms in office make it unlikely that elected representatives
will legislate only for their own benefit. After all, representatives
are drawn from the ranks of the people to which they can, after their
term in office ends, expect to return. Given what we might nowadays
call the incentive structure of representative government,
representatives have every reason to promote the people's interests
instead of their own. Indeed, in a properly structured system, there
will be an “identity of interests” between representatives and the
electorate (Mill 1992, 22).

Mill's views on representation stand mid-way between two opposing
views. On the one side are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other
“participatory” theorists who argue that to allow anyone
to represent you or your interests is tantamount to forfeiting your
liberty. On the other side are assorted Whig defenders of
“virtual representation”—including Edmund Burke
and, later, Mill's contemporaries Sir James Mackintosh and
T. B. Macaulay—who contend that representatives elected by the
few may best represent the interests of the many. On their view, one
need not have a voice—or a vote—to be well represented
in Parliament.

Against Rousseau and other opponents of representation tout
court Mill maintains that representative government is “the
grand discovery of modern times,” inasmuch as it allows the
interests of the many to be represented efficiently and expeditiously
by the few—so long, that is, as the many have the vote in order
to register their views and can moreover hold the few strictly
accountable for their actions while in office. Properly structured,
such a system serves to enhance liberty, since it frees most people
from the burdensome and time-consuming business of governing, thereby
allowing them to get on with their more productive individual pursuits
and, most especially, their productive labors (Mill 1992, 21).

But it was against Whigs who defended “virtual
representation” and advocated slow and piecemeal reform of the
representative system that Mill's main arguments were directed. He
holds that the very idea of virtual representation is a recipe for
misgovernment, corruption, and the triumph of the aristocratic or
“sinister interests” of the few at the expense of the
many. The public interest can be represented only in so far as the
public, or a considerably enlarged portion thereof, has the vote. Mill
is a radical individualist in that he insists that each person is the
best, perhaps indeed the only, judge of what his own interests
are. And if—as he also insists—the public interest is
the sum of all individual non-sinister interests, it follows that the
wider the franchise, the more truly representative the
government. Mill deems Whig defenses of a greatly restricted franchise
and virtual representation to be arguments against representative
government itself.

Mill's view that each individual is the best judge of his own
interests appears to stand in stark contrast with his praise and
apparent privileging of one particular collectivity—the
“middle rank, … that intelligent, that virtuous rank
… which gives to science, to art, and to legislation itself,
their most distinguished ornaments, and is the chief source of all
that has exalted and refined human nature…” It is to this
middle rank—the forerunner of the modern
“meritocracy”—that common laborers look for advice
and guidance, especially in moral and political matters (Mill 1992,
41–42). Although such remarks have struck many modern commentators as
a militant defense of middle class power and privilege, it is, in
fact, nothing of the sort. Mill rarely uses the phrase “middle
class,” preferring instead the more archaic “middle
rank.” And this, once again, underscores the continuing
importance of Mill's Scottish education. The notion of
“ranks,” as analyzed at length in John Millar's Origin
of the Distinction of Ranks (1806), had left a deep
impression. Millar's (and Mill's) “ranks” are not (quite)
“classes” in our modern sense—that is, purely
descriptive, fairly distinct, and normatively neutral socio-economic
entities—but are instead meant to pick out people of particular
intellectual merit and to mark gradations of moral and civic
influence.

Mill is quite careful to distinguish between a “class” and
a “rank.” The members of a “class” are united
by shared (and usually selfish or “sinister”)
interests. Members of the “middle rank,” by contrast, are
marked more by their education, intellect, and public-spiritedness
than by their wealth or any other social or economic
characteristics. They are “universally described as both the
most wise and the most virtuous part of the community
which”—Mill adds acidulously—“is not the
Aristocratical [class]” (Mill 1992, 41). Members of the middle
rank owe their position not to accident of birth but to “the
present state of education, and the diffusion of knowledge”
among those anxious to acquire it. By these lights the “radical
tailor” Francis Place, the stockbroker David Ricardo, the
wealthy philanthropist Jeremy Bentham, the Quaker editor William
Allen, and even James Mill himself—although not all
“middle class” by modern standards—belonged to the
esteemed middle rank. Clearly, then, the idea of a middle rank cuts
across the kinds of class divisions with which we are familiar
today. Hence any attempt to classify Mill as an apologist for
“the middle-class”
simpliciter is anachronistic and rather wide of the mark. He
is instead an early defender, avant la lettre, of the idea of
a meritocracy whose members are drawn from all classes and walks of
life.

The idea that Mill was an apologist for middle-class interests was, of
course, a later development. But what of his contemporaries' views of
the Essay on Government? For so short an essay, Mill's
Government proved to be remarkably controversial in his own
day. Tories and Whigs thought its message wildly and even dangerously
democratic, while many of Mill's fellow Utilitarians—including
Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and William Thompson—believed that
he did not go nearly far enough in advocating an extension of the
franchise. Although more “democratic” in private discussion, Mill
publicly advocated extending the franchise to include all male heads
of household over the age of forty, leaving them to speak for and
represent the interests of younger men and all women:

One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests
are indisputably included in those of other individuals, may be struck
off without inconvenience. In this light may be viewed all children,
up to a certain age, whose interests are involved in those of their
parents. In this light, also, women may be regarded, the interest of
almost all of whom is involved either in that of their fathers or in
that of their husbands (Mill 1992, 27).

This, his eldest son later remarked, was “the worst [paragraph] he
ever wrote” (J.S. Mill 1961, 98). Most of Mill's critics were quick to
seize upon it, if only because its conclusion contradicts two of
Mill's oft-stated premises, namely that each of us is the best judge of
our own interests and that anyone having unchecked power is bound to
abuse it. As William Thompson argued in Appeal of One Half the
Human Race (1825), Mill's premises pointed to the widest possible
extension of the franchise, and not to the exclusion of “one half the
human race,” viz. all women.

Although none of Mill's other essays—save, perhaps, “The
Church, and Its Reform” (1835)—proved so controversial,
each expands upon points made in passing in the Essay on
Government. Jurisprudence deals extensively with
rights—what they are, by whom they are defined, and how they are
best protected. In a similar vein and in a way that anticipates (and
arguably influenced) the younger Mill's On Liberty (1859)
Liberty of the Press defends the right of free speech and
discussion against arguments in favor of restriction and censorship.
Free government requires the free communication of ideas and opinions,
and good government requires an informed and critical citizenry. For
both, a free press is an indispensable instrument.

Another of Mill's essays, Education, outlines and anticipates
the main themes of his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human
Mind, Mill's most comprehensive inquiry into what his son would
later call “ethology, or the science of character formation” (A
System of Logic, Book VI). In Education Mill describes
the conditions most conducive to creating good men and, more
particularly, good citizens. Civic or “political education,” he says,
is “the key-stone of the arch; the strength of the whole depends upon
it” (Mill 1992, 93). Mill was fond of quoting Helvetius's dictum
l'éducation peut tout (“education makes everything
possible”). And certainly no other political thinker, save perhaps
Plato and Thomas Jefferson, set greater store by education than did
James Mill. By “education” Mill meant not only formal schooling, but
all the influences that go into forming one's character and
outlook.

In Prisons and Prison Discipline Mill applies his theory of
education to penal reform. Just as one's character can be well moulded
by a good education, so too may one's character be badly moulded
through miseducation. The latter, Mill maintains, is especially
evident in the criminal class. Criminals commit crimes and are sent to
prison because they have been badly educated. Punishment, properly
understood, is a kind of remedial education, and prison, properly
structured, presents the opportunity to re-mould inmates' misshapen
characters. Prisons and Prison Discipline delineates the
types of punishments likely to deter offenders or, failing that, to
re-mould and re-educate criminals to be productive members of
society. In these and other respects Mill's theory of punishment
mirrors Plato's. Like Plato, Mill draws a sharp distinction between
punishing someone and harming him. The purpose of punishment is to
reform (literally re-form) the soul or character of the inmate so that
he may be released into society without fear that he will harm
others. But to harm someone is to make him worse, and an even greater
danger to society (Ball 1995, ch. 7).

Mill envisaged a society inhabited by active citizens, always on their
guard against rulers or representatives who would violate their rights
and deprive them of their liberties. This, after all, is the central
theme of the Essay on Government, and the thrust of the
argument of Mill's article The Ballot, published in 1830 as a
contribution to the public debate preceding the passage of the 1832
Reform Act. Mixing logical acuity with withering ridicule, Mill
restates and refutes arguments against extending the franchise and
introducing the secret ballot. Only those with sinister interests
could oppose such reform.

Always the critic, Mill was himself a frequent target of criticism,
much of which came from quarters hostile to the kinds of sweeping
reforms favored by Bentham and the philosophic radicals. Mill's
Essay on Government first appeared in 1820, and was
subsequently reprinted in editions of his Essays in 1823,
1825, and 1828, which reached an ever wider audience, including (Mill
boasted) “the young men of the Cambridge Union.” Fearing that the
cause of moderate reform was in danger from Mill and the philosophic
radicals, Whig polemicists weighed in against Mill. One of them, Sir
James Mackintosh (1765, 1832), was an old Whig stalwart with a
plodding and ofttimes pompous prose style. The other, T. B. Macaulay
(1800–59), was a much younger and altogether more formidable
foe.

Macaulay's “Mill on Government,” published in the March 1829 issue of
The Edinburgh Review, is a remarkable mixture of logical
criticism, irony, mordant wit, and droll parody. That Mill's Essay
on Government is remembered at all today doubtless owes something
to Macaulay's memorable critique. The most remarkable feature of
Macaulay's critique is that it seems to be largely aloof from
particular political issues, focusing instead on what we would
nowadays call methodological matters. Against his older adversary the
twenty-eight-year-old Macaulay defends the “historical” or
“inductive” approach to the study of politics against
Mill's abstract, ahistorical, and “deductive”
method. Macaulay maintains that we learn more from
“experience” than from “theory,” and had best
beware of the simplifications and “sophisms” to be found
in Mill's Essay on Government. The most pernicious of these
is the “law” that men act always on the basis of
self-interest. This law, Macaulay counters, is either trivially true
(because logically circular) or patently false; in either case it
hardly suffices as a foundation upon which to erect an argument for
radical reform, much less a comprehensive theory of politics. And if
Mill's deductive logic fails, the entire edifice—including his
supposedly “scientific” arguments in favor of radical
reform—collapses with it (Macaulay 1992).

That James Mill, fierce polemicist that he was, did not respond
quickly and with no holds barred seems surprising, to say the least.
His eldest son offers one possible explanation. In his
Autobiography J. S. Mill remarks that “I was not at all
satisfied with the mode in which my father met the criticisms of
Macaulay. He did not, as I thought he ought to have done, justify
himself by saying, ‘I was not writing a scientific treatise on
polities. I was writing an article for parliamentary reform’. He
treated Macaulay's argument as simply irrational; an attack upon the
reasoning faculty; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that when
reason is against a man, a man will be against reason (J.S. Mill 1969,
95).”

Yet the younger Mill's account of his father's reaction to Macaulay's
“famous attack” (as the son later described it) is misleading in at
least two respects. In the first place, James Mill did not, and given
his own premises could not, distinguish between a “scientific treatise
on politics” and a coherent and compelling argument for “parliamentary
reform.” For he believed that any reforms that were workable and worth
having could be based only on an adequately scientific theory of
politics. The Essay on Government was intended to be both, if
only in brief outline. Moreover, the younger Mill leaves the
impression that his father, although angered by the attack, never
replied to Macaulay. But this is untrue.

For a time James Mill tried, without success, to persuade his friend
and fellow Benthamite Etienne Dumont to reply to “the curly-headed
coxcomb, who only abuses what he does not understand” (Mill to Dumont,
1829b). In the meantime there appeared Sir James Mackintosh's
Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy (1830) in which Mill's
Essay on Government was singled out for special
censure. There was nothing new in this; but what caught Mill's eye was
that Mackintosh's mode and manner of argument was borrowed, as the
author acknowledged, from “the writer of a late criticism on
Mr. Mill's Essay.—See Edinburgh Review, No. 97, March 1829.”
“This,” says Mill with evident relish, “is convenient; because the
answer, which does for Sir James, will answer the same purpose with
the Edinburgh Review” (Mill 1992, 305). Of course, the “writer of a
late criticism” to whom Mackintosh refers was none other than
Macaulay, whom the elder Mill then proceeds to answer in the guise of
replying to Mackintosh.

In his reply Mill reiterates and defends the arguments advanced in his
Essay on Government: all men—including rulers and
representatives—are moved mainly if not exclusively by
considerations of self-interest, and therefore the only security for
good government is to be found in making the interests of
representatives identical with those of their constituents. But,
unlike the cool, detached, and ostensibly deductive Essay on
Government, Mill's reply contains a good deal of vitriol. He
writes like a schoolmaster who, having lost all patience with a
slow-witted pupil, is content to ridicule him before his cleverer
classmates. The sight is not a pretty one, and shows James Mill at his
polemical worst. Whether, or to what extent, such a splenetic
rejoinder could suffice as a refutation is surely questionable.

In reviewing the quarrel between Mill and Macaulay today, the modern
reader may well experience a sense of déjà vu,
not because the question of parliamentary reform remains relevant and
timely, but because the epistemological and methodological questions
raised by this debate are with us still. What is the nature of
political knowledge, and how is it to be obtained? What sort of
“science” can “political science” aspire to be? What is the connection
between political theory and the practice of politics? Mill's answers
rather resemble those of modern “rational choice” theorists, and
Macaulay's those of their empirically minded critics. After all, Mill
maintains that any scientific theory worthy of the name must proceed
from a finite set of assumptions about human nature, with the
self-interest axiom at their center. From these one can deduce
conclusions about the ways in which rational political actors will (or
at any rate ought to) behave. Macaulay, by contrast, claims that
people act for all sorts of reasons, including—but by no means
limited to—considerations of self-interest.

Mill's Essay on Government—and Macaulay's
attack—earned for its author an unenviable reputation as an
egregious simplifier of complex matters. Yet Mill remained unrepentant
since such simplification was, in his view, the very purpose and point
of theorizing. After all, to theorize is to simplify. But, as his
critics were quick to note, it is one thing to simplify and quite
another to oversimplify. In a modern echo of Macaulay's estimate,
Joseph Schumpeter contrasts Mill's “monumental, and indeed
path-breaking,
History of British India” with the Essay on
Government, which “can be described only as unrelieved nonsense”
because of its simplistic assumptions and its equally simplistic
conclusions (Schumpeter 1954, 254). A more charitable estimate is
provided by Brian Barry. Barry observes:

The results [of Mill's reasoning] may appear somewhat crude, and yet
it seems to me a serious question whether James Mill's political
theory is any more of an oversimplification than, say, Ricardo's
economics. The difference is, of course, that Ricardo's ideas were
refined by subsequent theorists, whereas James Mill's Essay on
Government had no successors until the last decade or so (Barry
1970, 11).

These successors, on Barry's telling, include such rational choice
theorists as Mancur Olson and Anthony Downs, amongst others. Alan Ryan
concurs. Although “an eminently dislikable document,” Ryan writes,
Mill's Essay on Government “has virtues that ought not to be
neglected.” One of these is that it “stands at the head of a line of
thought extending down to Joseph Schumpeter and Anthony Downs, a line
of thought that provides many of the explicit or implicit assumptions
with the aid of which we still practice political science” (Ryan 1972,
82–83).

Although right in one respect, Barry's and Ryan's reassessments are
rather wide of the mark in another. It is true that there is,
methodologically speaking, a family resemblance between Mill's
axiomatic deductive reasoning in Government and, say, Anthony
Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). But it is
important to note that Mill, unlike Downs and other ostensible
successors of the rational choice school, was never content to
interpret interests as wants, desires or “revealed
preferences.” On the contrary, Mill was concerned with
distinguishing between sinister and non-sinister interests, supplying
causal explanations of their origins and development, rendering
judgments about them, and attempting to alter the conditions that
shape (or more often misshape) men's and women's characters. Hence his
abiding interest in law, education, punishment, penology, psychology,
and other avenues of “character-formation.” Mill's aims
were not only explanatory but critical, educative, and, by his lights,
emancipatory. The point of almost everything he wrote—from his
massive “critical, or judging” History of British
India to the shortest essay—was, to borrow a phrase from
Marx, not merely to understand the world but to change it. Not for
Mill the vaunted “value-neutrality” of modern social and
political science.